Grand Blanc woman finds a new home with Franciscan sisters
By Mark Haney
The Catholic Times
MANITOWOC, Wis. — Pamela Catherine Peasel didn’t meet a nun until she was an adult.
Now she is one.
The 31-year-old member of Holy Family Parish in Grand Blanc made her first profession of vows to the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity on Sunday, June 5, at an afternoon Mass celebrated by Bishop Robert Banks. Sr. Louise Hambrecht, community director of the Franciscan Sisters, received her vows. The new nun’s parents, Richard and Sharon Peasel. a brother and sister, godmother and the Franciscan sisters witnessed the event.
Sr. Pamela Catherine Peasel
The new nun was born in St. Louis, Mo., the third of five children — Ken, 36, and his wife Betsy live in Kentucky; Gregory, 33, lives in Grand Blanc; Tim, 28, and his wife, Julie, just got married and live in the Grand Rapids area; Diane, 26, lives in Carmel, Ind. The family moved to Grand Blanc when she was 8. She attended Grand Blanc Public Schools.
“When I was young — about 9 or 10 years old — is when I first felt that I had a call to the religious life,” she said. “I completely ignored it at that age — I did not know any religious sisters at all. It was only via the television.”
Though she was raised Catholic, her family stopped attending church for a period of time after the move to Michigan. When she began attending the University of Michigan-Flint, she was drawn back to the Church.
“Then, after I graduated from college (with a bachelor’s degree in secondary education in French and history), that call to become a religious came back,” she said. “Again, I kept pushing it aside because it was nothing I would have ever wanted for myself.”
She studied aboard for four months in France. “And it was during that trip,” she said, “that it consistently was coming back to a point where I could not really ignore it.”
She said she did pray more while in France but she thinks the call became clearer to her because she got away from home and the United States. “When you are away like that,” she added, “you do discover more of who you are and more about yourself. And it is a growing experience too.”
Still, she put the call aside, feeling torn between it and wanting to return to France to teach English.
“My family really wanted me to stay in the United States and teach French,” she said. “It got a little high anxiety and stress at that time so I reverted back to prayer again.”
In the meantime, she was teaching French and history at Almont High School.
At the same time, she was praying, which led to discernment.
“I began to think more and more about becoming a religious sister and what that all means,” she said. “But I kept saying I would wait before checking it out. ‘Give me another year, Lord.’
“When I was teaching there was still that part of me wondering, ‘what if I just check it out and just see where it takes me? And if it doesn’t work, I’ll always have my teaching to fall back on.’”
She visited the Trinitarians of Mary, an order which, while based in Mexico, has a mission in Lowell.
“That was the first time I had been around religious sisters,” she said. “I spent a day with them along with some of my fellow parishioners. When we went to leave, I broke into tears. And it wasn’t just this little cry, it actually was embarrassing and I didn’t know where any of that was coming from. I was literally sobbing. And one of the sisters came up and said, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ Which made it all the worse.
“I left there with a greater feeling I had a call, but again still that fear of pursuing it.”
She didn’t feel called to their order, so she checked out the Sisters of St. Joseph in Kalamazoo and the Dominicans of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist in Ann Arbor.
At one point, she also filled out part of an online questionnaire to match people up with a religious order.
‘The next day I had over 80 e-mail responses,” she said. “And the next day there were probably about 60 more. They just kept coming. And it was international; orders from all over the world.”
She was a bit overwhelmed by it all and wound up not really responding to any of them. “There are so many options for religious orders and when you are discerning that is just one of the things you don’t want to stress about,” she said. “How is God going to find a place for me that is going to fit who I am and I’m going to fit into their community?”
The Franciscan Sisters of Charity kept e-mailing her every month after that initial effort, letting her know about changes on their web page. That got her attention.
She had never heard of the Franciscans until her meeting with the vocations director in Ann Arbor. “She said she didn’t feel I had a call to be a Dominican, but that I should check out the Franciscans.”
So she contacted the two vocations directors and while she couldn’t come for a scheduled retreat, she told them she would like to visit the motherhouse sometime. They came to her instead, meeting her on a Saturday at the Tim Horton’s in Lapeer, where she was living at the time. They talked for an hour.
They invited her to a retreat, which was centered on the Sacred Heart, for which she has a special devotion and to which she had been praying.
“I came very open minded to whatever God had in store for the weekend,” she said. “When I got to the convent, it was very much like home. The sisters here are extremely hospitable and very genuine in their vocation. And the joy — everyone I ran into had this overabundance of joy. There is this real sense of peace just in being here. So I kind of knew when I left the retreat here that I had a pretty good idea that this was it.
“I was on cloud nine and came home and told my mom that I had found where I was going. She was a little sad because she didn’t think I’d find something so soon.”
She entered the order in August 2008, after spending part of that summer helping at a camp the nuns host for middle-school girls.
“It has been a wonderful journey,” Sr. Peasel said. “Any place you go to, even if it is a new job, you are going to have your down moments and your up moments. And the up here definitely outweigh everything. I don’t know how to put it just that there is this knowledge that God is leading me in the direction to follow Him. I’ve made my first vows and I have been extremely happy ever since. At the same time you don’t know where God is taking all of it. It is a lot of trust and living in the moment. But is have been very good so far.”
Since entering the religious community, she had been working on a master’s degree in education with a focus on teacher leadership at Silver Lake College of the Holy Family in Manitowoc. She will put her classes on hold as her new assignment this fall will take her to St. Peter School in Bapchule, Ariz.. to teach seventh- and eighth-grade girls reading, English and religion.
“I did want to be part of an order that had teaching as one of its apostolates,” Sr. Peasel said. “I enjoy teaching, I have a passion for it. And I didn’t feel that was something I was being called to necessarily give up.”
She still would like to teach French again, maybe even at the college level. But she came to the order to help.
“One of the people in administration here said there was a need,” she said. “That was one reason why I entered a religious community; to be where a need needed to be fulfilled, not to necessarily teach French.”
She can make her final profession of vows in three years but must do it by at least six years from now. She can delay it if she doesn’t feel ready to do that yet. Every year she will renew her vows.
“This was not anything I would have chosen for myself,” she said. “To know that with each step forward — entering postulant, entering novitiate, now as a temporary professed — it is surprising to me that I continue to be happy and that happiness does continue to grow. Knowing, in the back of my head, that this is not what I would ever imagined myself doing. And yet at the same time I can say I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.”